MEXICO AND HER “BOLSHEVISM”
Ten years ago Mexico was one of the great, progressive nations of the
world; to-day she is just “another Latin American Republic.” Then she
showed literally the achievement and the promise of Japan; to-day she
is as backward and as hopeless as Turkey. Ten years ago her diplomats
were honored in the councils of kings, her credit ranked with that of
the best of Europe, her cities were miniatures of Paris, her mines
operated with the perfection of those in England, her railways and
budding industries bore comparison with those of the United States,
her people lived in arcadian peace, wakening slowly and surely, if
sometimes painfully, to a civilization which was meeting their needs.
To-day, Mexico is a little worse than Turkey, a little better than
Hayti, her diplomats are as inconsequential as those of Thibet, her
credit is as low as that of Austria, her cities and ports are mud
puddles and pest holes, her mines are back to the rat-hole workings
of the colonial Spaniards and Indians, her railroads are rattling
skeletons, her industries virtually non-existent. Life is again
arcadian, with all those discomforts of Arcadia which the poets of old
and the propagandists of to-day neglect, so carefully, to mention.
The world has learned, in these past years, to take colossal
destructions calmly, so that few of us wonder and none of us really
questions the fact or the why of Mexico’s sudden and astounding
degeneration. And yet that failure is in miniature the threat and
the promise of the failure of our civilization, in epitome the boast
of bolshevism and the nightmare of capitalism. Mexico is like the
Chamber of Horrors at the old Eden Musee or Mme. Tussaud’s, a row of
illuminated pictures which tell in ghastly realism what is sure to
happen to careless people if they play too recklessly with the world
which is given them to use.
This seems indeed a cycle of bolshevism, but it is a cycle in which
radicalism, like capitalism, is a sorry victim. As a picture the events
in Mexico approximate the drama in Russia, carried to the logical
conclusions which such a drama would reach on any national stage where
personal aggrandizement is a mightier lodestone than public devotion.
The historical facts of the past decade in Mexico are unrelated to the
facts and background of Russia, yet in Mexico there have been heard the
same shibboleths, the same promises, the same cries of the downtrodden.
There have been seen the same red flags, the same uprisings and
assassinations, and the same “redistribution” of property as in Russia.
And more than all has unrolled the drama of the rising of obscure
chieftains and politicians to colossal and wicked power. But in Mexico
the cycle has gone far beyond Russia, perhaps because here there has,
indeed, been no touch of even such idealism as there may be in Moscow.
In Mexico the crimson day of bolshevism has been followed quickly by
the purple twilight of the aftermath of graft and privilege. To-day
there is to be seen there a power of wealth mightier than any which
is conceivable in the now almost forgotten dawn of bolshevism’s red
day in Mexico. Privilege and not the proletariat, capitalism and not
socialism, are the gods of that stricken land,--a land which ten years
ago was mistress of her life and of her destiny, and to-day is a beggar
in the marts of the world, ready to sell her body and her soul for gold.
I have no desire to force a parallel between the early events in
Mexico and those in Russia. The parallel is there, and could fill the
eye and mind with the aid of a modicum of imagination. But the facts
alone are eloquent, and the primary fact is not whether the revolution
against the czar was day for day and hour for hour a repetition of
the Madero revolution against Diaz, or whether Huerta was an Indian
Denekin, or Carranza a weak Lenin or Obregon the realization of what
Trotzky might be to-morrow or next year. The first fact and the last
is that in one great section of Mexico we have seen and in the whole
of Mexico we are to-day watching the rolling on of an ugly spiral from
plutocracy to revolution, from revolution to socialism, from socialism
to bolshevism and then from bolshevism to demagogy, to a later and
darker dictatorship, with a more miserable proletariat, and on into the
vast sweep of an age of privilege which holds and wields power greater
than government, greater and more direct than capital or labor has ever
wielded. For privilege stands alone in the midst of the smoking ruins
of what was once the Mexican nation.
He braves much in this day who dares define or limit bolshevism, but
in Mexico its manifestations have been carried to a point where they
have limited and defined themselves. First, Mexican bolshevism was and
is the application of political remedies to economic ills; second, it
is the raising up of the proletariat by promises and agitation to the
overturning of established government and the setting up, not of the
promised millennium, but of new dictatorships and new oppressions. Both
sought, and claim, the improvement of the workers, but both have failed
and faded to shadowy appearance and raucous boast.
In Mexico to-day there are spots where peace and progress reign--but
they are literally those spots where “capitalism,” entrenched behind
a wall of gold and foreign protection, has been able to give its
workers the value of the profits which they gain. The rest of Mexico
is worse off, politically and economically, than in the days of Diaz,
and increasingly the only hope of the country seems, by some means,
to achieve the extension of sane business to the replacement of the
economic ruin of native demagogues masquerading behind the fair words
of socialism.
The essence of the beneficent effects of this foreign business has been
the education of the Mexicans whom it touches toward broader horizons
of living and personal efficiency. For actually the history of Mexico’s
downfall is a history of the failure of her education, of the failure
of the past governments of Mexico to utilize the forces which were at
their hand for the uplift and the development of the unhappy masses of
the people. That failure of the past has become a colossal catastrophe
in the days of present and past revolution.
For their day and time, Spain and the Roman Catholic church did much
for Mexico. We do not know what the Church might have done if it had
had different, more educational ideals, but we do know that, save for
the work of the Protestant missions in the past thirty years, hardly
any other force but Rome has done anything for social improvement
in Mexico. We do not know what Anglo-Saxon educational and economic
leadership would have done in the place of that of the Spaniards and
mixed-bloods--such comparisons are necessarily academic. But we do know
that under the Spanish viceroys and under Diaz more was done toward
improving the material welfare and toward building the foundations of
material and moral prosperity for the unfortunate peons than has been
done or even sincerely attempted in the ten years of revolutionary rule
since the fall of Diaz.
Mexico has been, and indeed is, what we sometimes call in our brusque
Americanism, a “white man’s country.” It is essentially one of the
spots in this world where the burden of uplift is the white man’s
burden. For 300 years white Spaniards sought to lift it, and in that
long effort, with all its failures, they placed Mexico, even with her
six millions of unlettered, superstitious Indians, in the category of
the white lands. The duty of the white man, imperialist or socialist as
he may be, has ever been two-fold, and its duality has been its power;
we have lifted the material plane of our wards and we have upraised
those wards themselves to a higher and yet higher mental and spiritual
plane.
It is this dual duty that the revolutionists of Mexico have shirked
and have scouted. The economic rain of the country is to-day almost
complete, and its spiritual uplift has been halted as by a wall of
flame. From those material ruins, Mexico might conceivably rise in a
spiritual rebirth, but the fact has been otherwise, for the material
ruin has been accomplished by the prostitution of all the ideals,
all the sacred faiths of men, concentrated by self-seeking bandit
governments to the aggrandizement and the enrichment of a few sodden
favorites.
I would, if I could, paint a different picture, but the half lights of
such a panorama can be added only after the dull background has been
set in. And that background is dark indeed. The panorama of misery
begins when one crosses the northern border to-day. There the scattered
but once almost happy villages of other times have been replaced by
ruined, roofless railway stations lined with starving vendors of food
who fight with the bony dogs for the refuse of the very food they
sell. All the long trip to Mexico City is marked by the same voiceless
suffering, and the capital itself has a dismal dinginess that cries of
hopeless misery, in appalling contrast to the gallant days of the Diaz
“materialism.”
The unhappy toll of war and revolution, one says? Yes, in part, for
such “war” as Mexico has known always takes that toll and always, too,
from the weaklings, putting starvation and sickness and filth and
dismay where once were comfort and health and some cleanliness and
happiness.
But, again the question, was it not worth the price, will it not be
worth the price, in the victories won for human freedom? And here the
answer is unequivocably “No.”
Many hoped, with the fine faith of their own sincerity, that the
upheaval which followed Diaz was the dawning of a new era. But in
that hope even those who knew Mexico forgot the Mexicans and their
history. Political independence from Spain had been won, freedom from
the domination of religious bigotry had been won, before Diaz came. The
struggle of his day was one of uplift, carried on with faulty tools,
perhaps, but slowly reaching toward the light. Living was improving,
slowly; religion was improving, slowly; education was advancing,
slowly. Then came a period of crystallization; the Diaz oligarchy
grew old. Many sincere men, inside and outside Mexico, thought that
the advance could and should move more rapidly. Diaz repressed those
hastening reformers, and the spiritual force which finally broke forth
into the Madero revolution of 1910-11 was undoubtedly the result of
that repression of progressive thought.
Like all the revolutions of Mexico’s stormy history, this one began
with a beautiful stating of ideals and of the unrealized needs of
the common man; but as with all those other revolutions, the power
passed quickly to the hands of men whose sole “ideal” was personal
aggrandizement, personal wealth, and ruin to all whose needs might
incommode these exalted “leaders.”
The so-called “social revolution” of Mexico borrowed the battle cries
of European socialism, but in the land in which it worked it stirred up
only a tempest in a teapot, with the miserable masses of the country
serving as tinder and fuel beneath the vessel. The teapot is the
diminutive organized labor world of Mexico, and that is boiling more
violently, perhaps, than elsewhere. But to-day the “advanced” ideas of
Mexico serve, in the name of socialism, only to put sweeping power into
the hands of unscrupulous men, men who know and care nothing of the
responsibilities of power, and are using it only to the destruction of
the very bases of Mexican society.
Thus, while there seems to be a light dawning in the labor world of
Mexico, I am not sure that the light does not come from the burning
of something which Mexico cannot afford to lose. In that organized
labor world there are fewer than 50,000 workers out of a population
of 15,000,000, while there are more than 3,000,000 peons, heads of
families, who work, when there is work, in the fields, or as common
laborers. It is upon the continued, unbroken suffering of these
3,000,000 that the 50,000 profit to-day--the peons have but changed
masters once again and in the name of freedom, now, serve a vaster
company. The Mexican leaders, drawing their power in turn from the
coherent, organized industrial workers, are to-day destroying the
civilization of Diaz, and with it the civilization of American business
men, American teachers and American missionaries, which was and is the
hope of the downtrodden majority. The “modern” laws which labor has
promulgated might, we may conceive, fit the advanced industrial life of
Germany or the United States, but they are utterly suicidal to Mexico.
The new Constitution of 1917 has written into its fabric an idealistic
set of labor laws, beautiful in terminology but under present
conditions of industry and psychology and government in Mexico, about
as impractical for the development of industry and the true welfare of
labor as they are efficient as a means of graft and extortion against
labor as well as against employers. These laws are worked out for the
sole benefit of the industrial workers of Mexico, that total of less
than 50,000 as against the 3,000,000 farm and day laborers. They are
thus far more important as a propaganda document with the foreign
radicals who caused the inclusion of those administrative laws in the
new national constitution than they are helpful to Mexico’s own social
advancement.
The eight-hour day provided in the constitution, the welfare projects
such as the stern proviso that nursing mothers shall have two half-hour
periods per day in which to care for their children, the constitutional
support of the right to strike even in public utilities, and the
virtual provision against the employment of strikebreakers, or the
closing of a shop in a lock-out, are typical of the privileges for
labor--they cover everything which the most radical would make the laws
of every land. In Mexico, and under the peculiar conditions of Mexican
psychology and inter-class relationships, they become little more than
tools of the demagogues. The rulers do as they choose in any case,
as when, not long ago, a railway strike was successful to the last
detail of the demands made in the name of “the social revolution” and
two months later a similar strike for similar ends was opposed by the
general use of strikebreakers. The labor courts, theoretically a great
advance, are used almost without exception as a palladium of radical
propaganda--and as a toll-gate on the road of privilege.
Such are the reforms of the new era. They provide six or eight hour
days, for men who cannot read and whose children are not taught to read
or to think. They provide minimum wages, to be determined by factory
committees, with the most ignorant workmen in the world on a par with
employers and industrial engineers. They provide against discharge for
any cause except proven drunkenness, in a land where, to say the least,
drunkenness is relative.
Their own people have begun, a little, to wonder at the wisdom of these
sweeping changes, and one, Ing. Carlos Arroyo, not long ago wrote in
the official but very radical “Bulletin of Industry, Commerce and
Labor” that there were four main difficulties which would have to be
corrected before factory efficiency could be arranged in Mexico on a
coöperative basis: first, scientific method would have to replace the
empirical system now in use; second, there would have to be special
training for apprentices; third, there would have to be study of
employees to have them properly placed; fourth, the responsibility
for the tasks assigned would have to be “equally” divided (not given
entirely to the workers) between the management and the workers,
“because the former continues to be charged with the responsibility for
the competence of the latter.”
And as to that competence, this same bulletin regularly publishes the
records of accidents. There one will find that in 1918, for instance,
there were, in 278 industrial establishments having 292,364 employees,
6,424 accidents, in which 184 were killed, and 42 maimed and 6,198
wounded. And, most illuminating of all, 5,165 of the accidents were
admittedly due to the “carelessness of workmen,” only 195 were the
fault of the management and 1,064 were due to unavoidable causes.
As to the value of the achieved reforms, I have but this to tell: In
all the cities, in the centers of industry like the Tampico oil fields
and the busy port of Vera Cruz (busier to-day than it has ever been
because all Mexico must live on imported goods) I found a sullen hatred
of the foreigner, an ugly self-assertion that bodes but ill for those
missionaries of religion and of business to whom we look for so much of
the future regeneration of the country. I saw none of the contented,
happy calm of prosperous laborers, but only the unrest of the great
cities of other lands, ugly with resentment, fertile field for
revolution but not for progress. And yet those very resentful workers,
convinced of an unappreciated importance which they knew but by rote,
are all that there is of the “fruits” of the “social revolution” in
Mexico.
No, Mexico has not changed, even amongst her petted laboring classes,
and I fear that the old rule of our ancient civilization will have to
persist a little longer, and the long, dim road be trod again through
failure and reform, and failure again and yet again. I fear that we
shall still have to lift by reaching down and, by training the dull
forces of those dull minds, teach them to help themselves and to climb
by themselves.
Out on the plantations the workers are going the rounds which they have
covered since Mexico began, and in the fairs I saw the only evidence of
happiness which smile on one in the length and breadth of the country.
The market places and the fairs of Mexico, sunny, crowded, colorful,
rich because the Indians in the booths are close to Nature and Nature’s
bounty! That simple happiness has been the source of all Mexico’s
joy--and of all her misfortune. That simplicity has made her people
the dupes of predatory chieftains, and hideous priests of pre-Spanish
times, of Spaniard and priest through the long centuries of the
viceroys, of master and of some priests, too, through the years since
the Independence. Yet in those periods those who have duped the Indians
have, most of them, protected the Indians in an easy, medieval way, and
slowly there has grown a civilization, and in that civilization have
been nurtured the seeds of better things.
The time was coming for those seeds to bear fruit, when, hastening the
ripening, came the revolutions of 1910 and after. It was like the child
who pulled up the stalks to see how the seeds were growing--they were
growing much faster than appeared on the surface, but they did not grow
after they were pulled up.
Looking back to the Diaz day we can find, for instance, the slow,
constructive work toward the creation of arable land for small farms.
It was being hampered somewhat by grasping office-holders, but it was
advancing, a great national plan of irrigation to make possible the
use of small tracts in a country where rain conditions have forever
made small farming all but impossible. Then the revolution and the
resounding cry for “land.” The alleged land hunger of the Mexican
Indians and peons has been at once the rallying cry for each succeeding
revolution and the one appeal of all of them for foreign sympathy.
But whatever authorities may conceive as to the facts of the existence
of this land hunger or of the forms which it takes--a desire for
little farms, for prehistoric communal ownership, or for property only
because it is wealth and can be converted into cash--it is also true
that the schemes of the revolutionists for land distribution have
been impossible except by the confiscation of rich properties and the
destruction of vested rights. Obviously, no land which is not tillable
is satisfactory for distribution, and the tillable land of Mexico
is, as I have pointed out, actually only about 25,000,000 acres, or
one-twentieth of the area of the country. Land distribution must long
remain largely a beautiful theory, good only for raising up the natives
by direct appeal to their bitter poverty or to their human greed,
and for the raising up of foreign sympathy by the flaunting of the
misfortunes of the soil under more appealing names.
In Mexico to-day all these dreams of land distribution have gone
the way of other “reforms” for the benefit of the peons. Nothing,
virtually, has been done. Some great properties have been confiscated,
or “paid for” in unguaranteed bonds of bankrupt state governments, but
most of such properties are to-day in the hands of former revolutionary
“generals.” Some few have been distributed to Indians, but even
these tracts are taken with but scant enthusiasm. One great “land
distribution” in Yucatan called forth a crowd of 6,000 to the festival
(all Mexico goes to any _fiesta_) but only thirty Indians took up any
of the hundreds of small tracts offered.
The essential facts of the Mexican situation are patent to all who
go to Mexico to-day, and they are inescapable to those who have a
background of knowledge of Mexico by which to judge of what they see.
And yet it is true that in the councils of Carranza, in the entourages
of de la Huerta and of Obregon there have been men representing forces
which we in our time have felt could not be used to evil purpose.
These were men who had been stirred by the fine frenzy of the first
revolution, and whose ideas, caught as mere phrases by the leaders of
revolts, were handed back to their originators again, as the “ideals”
of the revolution. Strange indeed it is, and yet not only newcomers,
but foreigners of long residence and sincere and devoted Mexicans as
well, fell victims to that subtle flattery. In business, in education,
in the churches, there were such men, their very hopes too great to
protect them from the petty deceits of those who climbed to power upon
them.
I think I can understand why travelers in Mexico, sincere students
as well as moistily entertained excursions of American “Chambers of
Commerce” can be deceived as to conditions there. I have been inclined
to be impatient with those who let themselves be led this way and
that, and flattered by the apparent sincerity of self-deluding Mexican
officials, but Mexico is, after all, an eternal enigma. It is an enigma
because its colossal depths of ignorance and the smallness of its
deceits are literally incomprehensible to simpler and less subtle minds.
It is that enigma which I have sought through all my writing on Mexico
to resolve. On my last trip through the country, I saw just the eternal
Mexico, the Mexico of ignorance and misery, whose only change was that
it was a little sadder, a little more resentful of those whom it once
regarded as its helpers and its friends, a little more pompous in
parading its borrowed intellectual plumage.
A most perfect example of this ability of the Mexican of the “modern”
type to absorb one’s ideas and deceive one by the redishing of those
ideas, happened to me on my last trip to Mexico City. In the course
of the preparation of an article on a great business for a popular
magazine, I met a Mexican _licenciado_ (a title of vast elegance,
meaning much more than its dictionary equivalent of “lawyer”) who was
extremely anxious to be quoted as an expert on the subject which I was
studying. He evidently thought that my quoting him would help him to a
government post to which he aspired, so he expounded his ideas at great
length. When he was finished, I answered his arguments in kind, and
with considerable interest in his response to my counter-play. He was
pleasantly combative, and we parted in thorough friendship.
It was only a few hours later that I had an urgent call from this same
gentleman, who had, he told me, been going into new material on the
subject, and wished to express his views, stated in the morning, more
definitely to me. Whereupon he returned me, recooked and eloquently
served, my own friendly contentions of the previous interview. It was a
bit thick for me, but it is worth the telling that an American business
man of long experience in Mexico who had introduced this gentleman to
me remarked when the subject came up again, a day or two later:
“By the way, Licenciado Blank is getting much broader. He has figured
out a pretty decent attitude on this problem ...” and he redished me my
own views again!
This is Mexico to-day. On the top a group of men who have absorbed in
just this way the phrases of the intelligent radicals of the world
but who still remain, as always, sycophants without background of
education, or even genuine radical convictions. Below them the vast
misery of the unthinking serfs of the country, duller, certainly sadder
and even less well nourished than in the days of the viceroys and of
Diaz.
We are all responsible for the Mexico which is before us. We Americans
of every type in that old Mexico were too willing to let the misery
of Mexico be what it was, were too willing to take our helpers and
our support from the middle classes which were emerging so slowly.
We made a fetish of that middle class, built our hope of Mexico upon
it, called it the crowning achievement of the age of Diaz, and from
it came the beginnings of that group of Mexican leaders of which we
all had dreamed. We saw Diaz clear--all of us, I think--and knew
that his day could not be forever. But we had faith in that middle
class, forgetting, as it was easy to forget, the instability of that
foundation of Indian poverty and misery. We were going to transmute
those shifting sands by making more striking the examples of its
brothers--artisans and clerks and students and teachers. We trusted
so blindly, then, in the leaven of example--we knew so little of the
sodden flour which made our loaves.
And then came the day of revolution, Madero the deliverer. There were
few of us who regretted the passing of Diaz, save sentimentally,
that it should have to be in just that way--we had hoped he would
die gloriously, beloved by the people for whom he had given so much.
And then the disappointment and the horror of that wild cabal of
graft and loot under Madero, when the dreamers, the repressed brains
of a generation, stood waiting, wringing their hands in helpless
impotence--those who could, truly, have done so much! It was pitiful,
as was the aftermath of Huerta, the reaction, the impossible reaction
with its ugly tinge of a coming uprush of Indian barbarism.
Then Carranza, riding upon the winged horse of Madero--it seems that
not all of us understood, quite, for we heard the fair words, as
we have heard them echoing through empty halls and across dead and
tortured bodies these five years since. Many sincere men were caught
by those fair, echoing words, and many followed the phantom to the end.
And many continue to this day.
I have no need to talk of the recent past, nor of the present. The
story is written in the starving babies of the Mexican towns, in the
dismal railway stations where wretched food can be bought (if one
dares) from the very mouths of hungry, filthy vendors. Misery and grief
and pain stalk in Mexico to-day. Somewhere those who have used these
wretched bodies, as infinite in number, as minute in importance, as the
skeletons of a coral reef, for climbing to wealth and power--somewhere
these must make answer.
In another chapter I shall tell something of the story of Yucatan,
where the ideas of radical socialism were accepted and then used to
destroy even itself. It is a story of horror and of wreckage, the
clearest picture of Mexican conditions at their ultimate which has
passed in the gory panorama of the recent years.
What has happened in Yucatan is in essence what has been going on
all over Mexico. In the larger field of the whole country, the
revolutionists have been more coherent, and at the same time in their
utterances somewhat more considerate of the prejudices of the world at
large. Yucatan, isolated from the rest of Mexico, and free from the
prying eyes of most of the world as well, has gone on with the round
of despotism and oppression, rape and murder in the name of socialism,
but on the mainland, the “rights of labor” have been more elaborately
defended (in words) and the legal systems of confiscation and
anti-foreignism have been more logically developed, under the standard
of progressive socialism!
The years have written records of Mexican political and social
revolution which are identical with those of the present in all save
their battlecries. The first outbreak against Spain in 1810 and the
dozens of revolutions which followed it were a _reductio ad absurdum_
of the political ideals of Thomas Paine and the American and French
revolutionaries. The Constitution of 1857, under which Diaz ruled,
was little more than a copy of the Constitution of the United States,
and few of its provisions were really adapted to Mexico’s peculiar
conditions. So it is not strange, perhaps, that the Constitution of
1917 is as far from being Mexican and far more false an effort to solve
the nation’s problems than was its predecessor, for it was dictated by
foreign radicals and merely adapted by the Mexican politicians who knew
best what would arouse enthusiasm in the Mexican crowd.
Despite its beauties of theory and its direct appeal to the serious
radical thought of the world, its most useful function is becoming
obvious even to the most credulous, for it gives the governing groups
that control of Mexican life by which it is possible for them to
sell the privilege of doing business, because the ancient rights of
business are utterly done away with. The ills of Mexico are essentially
economic, and the new constitution and its revolutions, even more than
their predecessors, have sought to apply only the political remedy, a
remedy which has so far served only to destroy the efficiency of the
economic machinery of the country and place it upon the auction-block
of graft.
To-day all over Mexico, labor is paid higher wages than it ever
received, but it is paying more for its food and shelter than it
ever spent before. The misery of Mexico is just as obvious and as
unescapable as ever to him who sees truly. Save for those sections
where foreign business still survives the Mexican lives as he has
always lived, on the verge of pauperism. And upon the summit of the
heap, lounging in easy magnificence, is the mixed-blood agitator,
the general, the governor, the cabinet official who have battened on
Mexico’s misery before this day and will doubtless do so long after
this day is passed.
The raising of the Indian masses of Mexico by promises and by
high-sounding battlecries is a game as old as Mexican history; it is
played with unvarying success year after year and generation after
generation. The more extravagant the promises, the more complete the
enthusiasm of the “proletariat,” both for the political movement of the
moment, and for the one which follows it immediately upon the discovery
by the unfortunate “people” that the previous promises are not going to
be kept.
But in to-day’s orgy of revolution, Mexico has gone further toward
destruction than she has ever gone before. Values throughout native
Mexico are almost non-existent, and the wheels of Mexican civilization
like the wheels of the wheezy locomotives of her railways, creak and
groan on their rounds. The nation’s economic life is tied together
by strings, and what remains is only what has been salvaged from her
junk-heaps, and like the lawn-mower borrowed from a neighbor, is kept
running only to serve the purposes of the borrower.
The seventy years of warfare before Diaz left intact the civilization
of the Spaniards for Diaz to revive, but the ten years from Diaz to
Obregon have torn that civilization to shreds. Nearly all that Diaz
built has disappeared, and to-day the business of Mexico is swapping
jack-knives and selling food and shelter at the highest prices the
traffic will bear.
No man who would face truth in Mexico can ignore these potent facts.
And the reason is not revolution, nor even mere radicalism, but the
cynical application of political control to economic needs for the
aggrandizement of individual leaders whose power is in the market for
all who will buy the privileges which they have to offer.
It is in this condition that the importance and the menace of
radical Mexican government are found. What it has seemed well to
call bolshevism in Mexico has its greatest power in its mere threat
against capital and business. That threat, the mere presence of the
anti-capitalistic constitution and laws, has probably far greater power
than their actual application would have. Once the blow of confiscation
fell, the answer from the world of business and civilized government
would be quick and sure--Mexico cannot be ignored as Russia can be, for
Mexico lies in the center of the trade-routes of the globe, and we in
the United States would feel the menace of her anarchy too strongly to
remain passive.
But the static power, the threat of laws which are never
enforced--there is the menace and there the great influence which
creates the graft and cynicism of Mexican officials. So long as
those laws remain, business, if it would survive in Mexico, must
buy immunity. And it does buy it, for business is ever timid, and
no single business organization and seldom a group of business
organizations, will ever go to the stake for a principle. Its duty
to its stockholders and to its employees makes it buy its way, not
always by direct graft, but in submission to vast taxes, to unwarranted
extortions, to the riding of official annoyances--rather than accept
the shut-down and fight with its own great power, its inertia of
movement or of the silence which ruins empires.
In recent months the great business groups in Mexico have opposed a
certain amount of strength to the growing power of the auction-block
of Mexican graft and privilege. The oil companies have from time to
time offered a solid front to the encroachments of this marketing of
the privilege of doing business in contraversion of the temporary
laws of Mexico. They have held back, apparently, the crushing fall of
actual enforcement of the confiscatory provisions of the Constitution
of 1917, and they have, here and there, stopped the marketing of
privilege--for brief periods. But looking at the whole picture, it
seems as if the Mexican officials of the present era are in no greater
hurry to enforce the confiscation than are the foreigners to have it
enforced. The static power of those provisions, waiting to fall, is
far more profitable to Mexican pockets than would be the sudden and
final crash of their genuine application. Their enforcement would be
of little value to the seller of privilege, for then he would have to
invent another method of extortion. No, privilege will long remain
upon the market counters of Mexico. It will remain there, in fact,
until some means is found, within or without Mexico, for destroying the
system which is so profitable. That need of change is the crisis of the
business world of Mexico, the crisis of all who would do business with
Mexico in the present or in the future.
What, then, can save Mexico in this crisis? The panacea of the Obregon
idea was certainly not a solution. Here indeed was a probably genuine
desire to solve the problem in a final and glorious way. But the tools
were but the tools of the old days of Carranza and the rest. That was
a political remedy for an economic condition, and its promise was a
sordid thing, an unworthy thing for Mexico or for the United States to
expect. For the promise of Obregon was at first for reaction, a belief
that Obregon was comfortably wealthy already or that his ambition was
for power alone. Therefore he was to be the great conservative, who
would save Mexico by slipping back to the days of Diaz. But reaction
must always fail in the end. In this case it passed quickly, for this
was a “reaction” which was part and parcel of the “radicalism” of
Carranza, its power but a manifestation in another form of the same
personalism, the same sale of privilege, which made Carranza impossible
and in the end, brought him to his ruin.
The later developments of the Obregon idea were marked by an obvious
anxiety to reach a permanent solution of the immediate and pressing
difficulties of Mexico, and most of all to secure recognition by the
United States and financial aid from American bankers, as the _sine
qua non_ of such a solution. The efforts put forth were powerful, but
the driving force back of them was primarily personal ambition and the
realization that only such a solution could save the happy hunting
grounds of revolutionary leaders from some sort of foreign intendancy.
And above and beyond and behind all, were the factors of government
whose origins and whose immediate past seem indeed to be as firmly
stamped upon their natures as the spots upon the leopard or his skin
upon the Ethiopian.
The completed cycle of the bolshevist experiment and the arrival back
at the sale of privilege links up with the failure of Obregon to offer
anything but, first, a promise of reversion to reactionary czarism and,
second, that unconcealed offering of privileges and promises of power
to all who could or who might aid in the campaign for recognition and
for foreign loans. The condition seems to me to sound a call as of
Elijah for a new understanding of the Mexican problem. Carrancism might
have been but an isolated interlude, might have been a mere question
of observation and interpretation, if the end had not come and if
business in Mexico were not continuing to pay for its sorry privileges
in the same sorry way. Obregon might perhaps have been the hope for
peace and happiness in Mexico if we had not had Carranza and de la
Huerta and if their followers, with their cynical mouthings of all the
most sacred faiths of man, were not to-day still the rulers of Mexico,
still the sellers of privilege in the name of human progress.
We must, I believe, cast away the too long nurtured idea that the
battle in Mexico is between the progressive thought of the day and
the reactionary conservatism of great interests. I have sought here
to show why this is so. A revolution which can evolve the idea of the
socialization of great industry and can, in the very conception of that
idea, turn it to the looting of that industry for private graft and
gain, as in Yucatan; a revolution which can produce the uncontrolled
radicalism of Carranza and evolve through the cynical play-acting
of de la Huerta into the promise of reactionism in Obregon with all
the unholy forces which supported Carranza rallying to uphold his
successors--such a revolution will not, unredeemed, carry Mexico into
her next era of progress and peace. Capital and socialism must alike
beware. Neither should, in honesty with itself, accept a cause in
Mexico until the issue is joined clear.
In the past ten years we have seen in turn the appeal of political
Mexico, to-day to the bolshevist, to-morrow to the Christian
missionary, to-day to the thinking radical of the universities,
to-morrow to the deep-dyed conservative of the counting room. Confusion
has piled upon confusion until we have each seen in Mexico what we
hoped or what we feared.
We can only begin to see the truth, and in the truth the solution of
the complicated Mexican problem, when we clear our minds of these
old ideas that he who is against the revolutionary government in
Mexico is a hopeless reactionary, and that he who is for it is a
raving bolshevist. For the Mexican revolution is part of the “world
revolution” only as the shibboleths of that vast upheaval have been
turned to the aggrandizement of Mexican leaders who know neither what
the phrases mean nor where they lead.
If this is grasped, and if we will look at Mexico as a problem for us
all, then the beginning of the road away from foreign intervention and
the peril to our peace and Mexico’s will begin to open. Intervention
can be avoided, even though it may be grievously close to-day. But it
cannot be avoided until we see clearly that the issue of intervention,
like the whole issue of the Mexican revolution, is not one of
capitalistic interests against the unhappy Mexican peon, but a struggle
of all the constructive thinkers and workers of the world--be they
radical, socialistic, religious, philosophical, laborite, capitalistic,
industrial or social, be they American, English, French, Russian or
Mexican--against forces of greed and ignorance which turn every ideal
of honest men to the prostitution of their country and the exploitation
of their fellows within and without its borders.